One solution that we keep hearing about from different companies is about reducing the total seat costs by using Salesforce.com for the front-line salespeople, but something like SugarCRM for the call centers. Using two separate cloud applications isn't unusual, but it does lead to the question of where the data is stored and how it is moved from one application to another. One company had a middleware data mashup product from Apatar.com periodically moving data back and forth to make sure the call center knew about recent outside sales activity.

The gist is that there are tons of applications out there that don’t quite do what you want, and you need something inbetween your various applications that can squish/slice/dice the data to fit each side. However, what the CEO of Apatar was trying to point out is that sometimes you don’t need full time middleware and that he has a lighter weight variation on the theme called “Apatar”. He described it as a “data mashup tool” that has connectors to a large variety of data sources and action items to manipulate the data in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways.

Last week the world’s largest annual computer expo, the CeBIT conference, was held in Hannover, Germany. This year there was also a focus on the “application development” side of technology, which included a large area devoted to open-source and a number of panels on topics such as Virtual Worlds, Digital Content Distribution, as well as a panel on “Business Solutions with Enterprise Mashups”. Ludmila Radzevich from Apatar (provider of an open-source data integration tool) was on hand to represent data mashups.

You might be able to save up to $100,000 a year by renegotiating your data integration licenses, according to this post published on Apatar's blog. Of course, Apatar is an open source data integration solution provider and has a vested interest in reminding you that you could save on licensing fees. But that number is actually from recent Gartner report, according to the post.

The backup guy, the storage guy, and the virtualization guy are going to quickly become "the guy" in many organizations. Having a separate management and monitoring application for each one of these applications isn't going to cut it any more. Tools will be needed, like those from Tek-Tools and Apatar that offer complete monitoring and reporting of storage management, data protection, and virtualization management in a single console.

This is the second part of my post about building an RSS Reader with Oracle and Apatar. If you have all the prerequisites mentioned in the previous post in place, let's proceed with the database schema. This is enough to define the Apatar transformations which will load RSS posts into the table automatically.

This article considers the example of integrating QuickBooks with salesforce.com. But, there is more to improved QuickBooks and Salesforce integration than just saving time and effort; quality data integration makes for better business processes which helps accelerate sales in various lines of business. On the one hand, you have the sales department that uses Salesforce, which is always updated with customers’ credit and invoice information obtained from the back office’s QuickBooks. On the other hand, your accounting department is guaranteed to keep abreast of the current sales by having their QuickBooks synchronized with Salesforce.

IBM i users can integrate customer data stored within DB2 with SugarCRM or transfer data to and from DB2 to SugarCRM. They can also improve the quality of corporate/customer data stored in DB2 prior to entering SugarCRM, or vice versa.

New Apatar Connector was recently released to aid those struggling with integration of open source suite SugarCRM with third-party applications, databases, flat files, other CRM/ERP applications and Web 2.0 destinations.
Apatar claims to be able to do it all "without coding".

Apatar recently announced its official connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite for the construction of a new SugarCRM connector that can be deployed by all business users with no requirement for coding skills.

Apatar, which sells open source software aimed at the data integration market, has officially announced connectivity to the SugarCRM open source suite. Apatar officials say the new SugarCRM connector is designed to integrate data between their customer relation management system and what company officials describe as "a variety of third-party data sources, allowing for this data to be filtered, validated, and cleansed."

Apatar, a vendor of open source tools for data integration, today announced connectivity to the Vertica Analytic Database, a grid-based column-oriented database management system used for analytics and business intelligence.

Apatar Inc., is an industry leader in data integration and data
fluidity (made that up) who announced the release of their Apatar
On-Demand application to the Salesforce appexchange. Promising a
smoother flow of information between Salesforce Accounts and Quickbooks
as well as providing a few other perks like a data quality service. Apatar’s press release proudly proclaims that all this will decrease deployment time "by a factor of ten".

Software as a service (SaaS) and open source continue to converge.
The latest example is Apatar On-Demand, which now synchronizes
Salesforce.com CRM and Intuit QuickBooks accounting software. Apatar specializes in open source tools for data integration. And
filling the gap between Salesforce.com and QuickBooks should be of
great interest to VARs and managed service providers. Here’s a bit more
about some of the trends here.

A fan of QuickBooks and Salesforce.com CRM? Then you
might want to check out Apatar OnDemand, a new hosted integration
solution that synchronizes data between QuickBooks and Salesforce.com.
According to the press release, it’s designed for business users and can be set up within 30 minutes via a browser.

Apatar Inc. is working with Cdyne Corp. to offer a Web-based data
hygiene service for removing the names of deceased persons from
marketing lists and databases. The service verifies Social Security numbers
used for customer identification against the U.S. Social Security Death
Index database.

I just spent some time looking at Apatar,
a company that's offering an extract, transform, load (ETL) and data
integration solution under the GPL (with commercial support
subscriptions available also). The really cool thing
is that Apatar provides a visual designer and mapping tool in order to
hide the complexity of ETL and data integration from the typical
(business) user.

According to analyst firm Aberdeen Group, 52%
of organizations consider the "verification of data accuracy or
completeness" to be one of the biggest customer data management
challenges. Indeed, the principle of "garbage in, garbage out" is one
with which many manufacturing IT managers continually struggle.

As more and more enterprises move to adopt MashUps the question of what
content, and from where is it coming, is being asked more and more
often. I guess it's part of the move we are all taking part in from
using structured data, created by our own computers, to an increasing
use of unstructured data, which could be described as created, and used
by, people with the resulting ‘inconsistencies’.